Twenty-Nine The Dark Observatory

TWENTY-NINE

The Dark Observatory

MARY

T he halls of the monastery were eerily silent, save for a cluster of soldiers, who appeared to be running from something rather than after it. We crushed into a side passageway as they streaked past, then descended into the tunnel to the Oruse.

I led the way, though it took all my will to focus. Tane was the only thing keeping me on my feet between pain and a head full of the taste, the feel , of Quelling the air in the soldier's lungs. But as we reached the stairs Tane began to glow, separating from my body and preceding us up the stairs.

I immediately stumbled, the injuries I'd taken from the soldiers suddenly manifesting in a dozen ways. I managed to snag Samuel's arm before I fell, but my stolen sword hit the stairs and clattered back down into the tunnel.

"Tane!" Samuel braced me and shouted after the ghisting—half rebuke, half question.

She ignored him, standing at the top of the stairs and peering into Adalia's shrine, her chin thrust forward like a hound catching a scent. I had just enough time to resent her neglect, then fear its cause, before Adalia Day stalked from the chamber with a spear in hand. Aside from the shaft, the head of the spear was wooden too, hardened and polished, and reflected her own ghisten glow.

She cast one look between Tane and me, her gaze flickering to the gently glowing tether of ghisten flesh between us. Then she hurled the spear at Tane.

Tane buckled around the projectile, her ethereal flesh dissembling into a churning mass of smoke. The spear clattered across the floor, but the damage was done. I buckled too, an explosion of pain rippling through my chest and out to the crown of my skull, the tips of my fingers and toes.

You brought them here . Adalia's words were only audible to Tane and I, but they still reverberated in my ears, in my bones, chased by the agony of Tane's spectral wound.

Sam's arm cinched, holding me up. He shouted something, presumably to Benedict, since the Magni appeared at our sides a second later with my sword in his good hand.

I had no choice but to go with them, stumbling to the far side of the stairs.

You gave your word to shelter us! Tane shot back. She was moving now, sweeping backwards in a form that was half herself, half smoke.

Adalia scoffed, her face transforming into a ghastly smile. She was still lovely, still poised and regal in her gossamer robe, but her features hardened into jagged, wrathful lines. I protect my own, and you have risked them all.

"Mary, can we risk leaving her?" Samuel asked me.

"Of course we fucking leave her," Benedict snapped.

"If Tane and I are separated, she can be killed," I snapped back. I found my footing, watching over Samuel's shoulder as ghisten light swelled. It filled his face with shadows, half-turned as he was, and I saw the prompt in his eyes.

He had no idea what to do. Ghistings were my world, not his.

We all startled as Tane seized Adalia's spear from the tiled floor and lunged at the supposed Saint, stabbing and sweeping with speed and ferocity.

As she moved, even as Adalia shattered the wooden beam above her head and armed herself with long shards of wood like daggers, Tane's voice came to me.

Run. Through the observatory. There is another way out.

What about you?

I am right behind you. Go!

"Through the observatory," I said to Samuel. I grabbed my sword from Benedict, who glared and took up his pistol again. I held out my other hand for Samuel. He took it, warm and tight, and we hastened up the stairs. "She'll follow."

Adalia's head snapped up and dust began to fall from the ceiling. The structure around us trembled.

Roots erupted from the floor. I darted aside as a thick tendril lanced towards my ankle, coiling like a snake.

Benedict was not so quick. He elected to stomp on a reaching root and succeeded only in making his leg more accessible. The root wrapped around his calf, and he smashed it unsuccessfully with his pistol butt. Samuel, meanwhile, was driven away by a rush of smaller roots.

"Move!" I raised my sword. Ben froze, more in shock than capitulation, and I hacked down at the tendril. It did not yield, too fresh and green and strong.

Benedict cursed and tried to take the sword from me, but I elbowed him aside and hacked again and again. Samuel intercepted another root trying to claw my robes and pinned yet another to the floor with his musket butt.

The root holding Benedict finally yielded, but more rose up. Three lunged directly for my hand and wrapped around my sword—I let go rather than see my fingers snapped. More roots peeled out of the walls, reaching for the three of us as we stumbled on down the passage, around a corner, and into sight of the observatory door.

Now weaponless, I glanced back, watching the tether between Tane and I thin more and more, its glow fading until it was little more than a thread.

Tane!

Ghisten light swelled. The thread thickened, and Tane burst around the corner. She lunged back into my bones as Samuel led us through the observatory's already yawning doorway.

No roots reached for us here, though a rumble persisted in the ground beneath our feet.

What did you do to Adalia? I hissed to Tane.

I should have burned her from her tree , was Tane's only response.

We glanced around an octagonal room dominated by its huge spyglass on a stand. I ignored walls covered with star charts and diagrams, noting a dragonfly lantern on an iron hook. I ran over, my body steady again thanks to Tane's support, and took it.

Its golden light washed around us as Samuel passed through another door on the far side of the chamber and down a sloping passageway. A curve, a drop, and we faced another iron-banded barrier.

Samuel shoved, and the door swung outward a few inches before it jammed. Others had clearly fled this way before, the passageway scattered with snow and forest debris, but roots had attempted to close it again.

Samuel pushed a second time. Dry leaves rustled and rained through the gap, accompanied by a rush of cold, fresh air and the groan of straining roots.

I glanced back down the passage, sure at any second the tunnel would explode with knotted branches and clawing roots. The floor rumbled again, and dust rained from the ceiling.

"Sam?" I prompted, backing closer to the door.

Ben craned to see. "Push harder!"

"I am," Samuel gritted out. I heard a crunch of ice-hardened snow and the snap of a branch, but the barrier remained in place. "Stand back, both of you."

I shuffled away and Ben skulked, an expression of quiet disgust on his face. At first I thought it was directed towards Samuel or the door, then I saw the way he shifted his bad arm and glanced back down the passageway. His eyes were pained and haunted beneath his perpetual glaze of anger.

Pity tugged at me.

Samuel slammed into the door with a crack, a moan, and a fresh rain of deadfall. The door relinquished another few inches, and he finally squeezed through. I made to go after him, but Ben beat me to it. He elbowed me aside and pushed through the gap.

I swallowed my irritation and followed into the cool of the night. "We need to find Charles."

"I see a road," Ben called from a pace away. His half-shadowed form moved and, carelessly, let go of a pine branch. It immediately smacked me in the face.

I let out a garbled curse and just resisted the urge to throw the lantern at him. My nerves were beyond frayed now, the pain of Adalia's attack on Tane lingered in my bones, and the stab of a thousand needles on my rapidly cooling skin made my eyes water.

"Watch out," he said belatedly.

"I am not your enemy," I shot back, still grasping the lantern like a weapon. With effort I took hold of myself and held up the dragonfly-filled glass. "We can't risk this light, not out here."

Sam nodded and I unlatched the lantern's small door. The dragonflies flew free, swirling around us in eddies of gold. They converged on Samuel for a breath, and, despite the tension of the night, I was not impassive to the eerie awe of that scene— Samuel in his dark monk's robe, framed by pine boughs and girded with snow, surrounded by a swirl of tiny, Otherborn creatures. The Sooth's expression was stalwart, with a quiet fatigue and determination.

Then the dragonflies streamed away into the trees, darkness resumed its hold, and Sam and I joined Ben on the road. We set off at a jog, or as much of one as our injuries and the rutted, crusty snow afforded.

What felt like an eternity later—minutes riddled with tension and straining ears, and an unsettling lack of sound drifting from the monastery—we found Charles. He had already retrieved our stashed weapons and readied a stolen quartet of horses, which we dispersed to.

"Sam, will they be tracking us in the Other?" Charles asked, setting his musket across his knees as he pulled up his collar and tugged down his sleeves against the cold. Dawn was breaking, and a morose twilight spilled through the trees behind him, throwing his haggard face into partial silhouette. "Enough other monks have fled that our trail will be hard to find, at least with a natural eye."

Samuel shook his head. "Yes. Inis Hae was there, the Sooth the mage at the creek mentioned. We came into contact in Tithe, and it is him that has been tracking me all along."

"I may have killed him," Ben stated. "I certainly tried."

That failed to console me, not least because of Ben's callousness towards his actions. Still, I couldn't help but envy the simple, uncomplicated way he accepted his violence.

Images of the soldiers flickered through my head again, accompanied by flashes of terror, satisfaction, and anger so deep, so fierce, I'd been blind with it.

Charles nudged his horse into movement. "If Hae has your scent, you should wear Mary's talisman. I know there are risks to you using Sooth talismans too much, but—"

"Either way, he can track us. Our best chance is to claim what lead we can." Samuel glanced at his brother. "Though I hope you did kill him."

My horse came up alongside Charles, and we exchanged a look of veiled uncertainty. Then, knowing my part to play, I began to hum. I drew the winds to me gently, tasting them. The varied possibilities of spring were all within reach, and I saw what they could be.

A storm of deadly ice.

Sam went on, "I have lost sight of Hart . The last I saw of him, he was still being escorted east, presumably to Ostchen."

The gathering winds scudded around me, sensing my distress. I snatched at them again, singing low words now—a child's lullaby, the only thing my exhausted mind could produce.

Tane felt my hopelessness. We will escape Mere , she told me, the familiarity of her speech an ineffective balm.

"How could you lose the ship? I thought only ghistings could affect your sight," Charles asked.

"Any concentration of Otherborn creatures will," Samuel hedged.

"Including a fleet of ghisten ships," Ben said, the word like a stone dropped down a long, dark well. "Like the Mereish Fleet. In Ostchen."

"All roads lead there," Samuel concluded ominously. He twisted in the saddle to survey us. "I cannot abandon Hart and the crew, and the Uknaras. Besides, if I struggle to see into Ostchen, Hae will too. It will be simple for us to disappear in a city full of mages and ghistings. Would you all agree?"

His question was weary, irritated, with a hint of beseeching. I knew that tone. He was driven towards his duty as Hart 's captain but hated to risk us.

" Hart is as much of a home as I have," I said, infusing my words with the courage I wanted to feel. My winds blew steady now, strengthening and turning around us in an ever-widening churn. They smelled of rain and snow and power. "I'm with you."

Charles shrugged. He looked more than a little intimidated, too tired for bravado. "All right," he agreed.

The wind tossed Ben's tangled, blood-sticky hair into his eyes as he stared into the dawn and grunted, "Fine."